


Do You Wanna Build a Snowman

by tisfan



Series: Imagine Tony and Bucky 2016/2017 [24]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Gross, M/M, Mandarin, The Ten Rings (Marvel), frozen, unauthorized use of a severed hand, zero ring
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-28
Updated: 2017-06-28
Packaged: 2018-11-19 10:17:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,112
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11311305
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tisfan/pseuds/tisfan
Summary: When the Mandarin dies, he sends the ten rings out to find a new worthy wielder.This guy... ain't it.





	Do You Wanna Build a Snowman

**Author's Note:**

> Prompt: Bucky somehow gets frozen again but only for a very short time cause its Tony to the rescue. When he wakes the only thing he can do is ask what year it is while trying not to panic. Tony goes into mother hen mode.

“So much fuss,” the man said, and he really wasn’t a man at all, but a boy in his late teens, someone who should never have drawn the unfavorable attention of the Avengers, “for so small a thing.” He reached for the band of alien metal hanging off the tree-limb. Tony eyeballed the scene; they didn’t have much longer and the waves of ice-golems that the temple had unleashed as guardians were slowing the Avengers down. Cap went down in a wave of them, then burst up, spinning like a red-white-blue pinwheel, knocking animated snowmen in all directions.

“Great,” Clint said, climbing up to a better vantage point. Tony wasn’t watching him, mind you, but the HUD was keeping track of where all the Avengers were, mapping out their relative positions on the combat grid. “We’ve got ourselves an old-fashioned Tolkien human wanna-be here.”

“Only a Tolkien geek would be able to pass the Mandarin’s temple trials,” Natasha said. “I am telling you, censorship is not such a bad thing. Or at least, make sure to give them the wrong answers.”

Hulk smashed into the melee and opened up a good third of the battlespace in a single swipe. _Atta boy_ , Tony thought, darting into the space left behind by the Hulk and repulsing a good half dozen; where were they coming from? If he could just close off the spawn point, that would make this battle a lot easier. His boots were losing traction on the icy floor; the creatures bled some sort of slurry ice-water that froze almost as soon as it hit the stone.

“No, what we need to do is make sure the next Mandarin has more obscure taste in literature,” Sam said. His guns barely made a dent in the ice and snow monsters, and he would have been the perfect person to zip ahead, except the temple was guarded against fliers. Both Sam and Tony were forced to fight their way through on foot. It was that or learn to maneuver in space, something Sam couldn’t do, and Tony would not.

“What we need to do right now is make sure that Frosty the Snowman doesn’t put a ring on it,” Tony snapped. He was tired of Ten Rings; the old Mandarin had been old, and while not a good man, he’d been mostly retired. But he’d gone and done the whole setting up of Makluan temples and tests to claim the rings. Which would have been fine, maybe, except that this particular Mandarin fuckwit had sent out advertisements, telling people the Ten Rings were in play and fucking daring someone to try to claim them.

The Avengers had been chasing over the globe for weeks now, grabbing the would-be Ring Bearers. The biggest problem seemed to be that the rings themselves refused to be contained. If a potential Mandarin solved the puzzles and obtained the ring, he or she could wield it, but if an Avenger plucked it off their smoking corpse, the ring would vanish and reappear in a different temple.

Tony scanned the HUD again. A single red star glinted, totally out of the expected path. “Bucky, baby, sweetheart, what the fuck are you doing?”

“Linin’ up th’ shot, kitten,” the Winter Soldier said.

Tony finally found him, perched high in the ruins, the rip-tear of vacuum only inches above his head. Had Bucky crab-crawled the whole way, mere seconds away from being suffocated, frozen solid in space? Tony’s HUD indicted an accelerated heart-rate and rapidly rising blood pressure before Friday sent another cooling wave of chemicals into the pharmaceutical suite. “Boss, head in the game,” she scolded.

Just what he needed, a babysitting momma duck AI.

Tony found the spawn point, finally, the shimmering faint traces of extradimensional energy that was letting the ambulatory popsicles in from whatever dimensional disaster they’d come from. “William Tell,” Tony snapped. “I need you over here; sticky up this portal before we get more snowpocalypse reinforcements.”

Clint was so good with his aim that Tony didn’t even bother to stop moving in order to let him get the shots in, he just waited until the external mics picked up the gentle thrum of Clint’s bowstring and Tony lit up the sticky substance as soon as it came in. Together, Tony’s flame-thrower and Clint’s arrows worked like a sort of double adhering napalm, grabbing the creatures and melting them to steam. The battlefield was obscured in the thick mists.

Thor whirled his hammer, clearing the fog.

The Mandarin candidate slid the ring onto his finger. He turned, raised his hand, the white Zero band glittering and catching all the light like a fallen star.

“Ha, gotcha,” Bucky said, soft. A second later, Tony heard the boy gasp as Bucky’s bullet went right through the kid’s wrist, nearly severing the hand that bore the ring.

A blast of frost, glittering and deadly, shot from the ring as the boy fell to his knees, screaming.

The frost touched the Winter Soldier and for just a moment, everything was fine.

Then Bucky was captured in an icy shell like a diamond, frozen in a moment of perfect horror. The block teetered on the wall.

Tony had seen this, seen it a dozen times or more. If that block touched the ground and shattered, there was no hope. Bucky would be broken, irrevocably and unrecoverable.

“No!”

“Tony!” Steve was running, flat out, toward the far side of the compound, where Bucky was falling; falling.

Steve threw the shield down in front of him, jumped on it like it was a fucking snowboard, and Tony gritted his jaw, tracing vector angles; fired the repulsors to give Steve an extra burst of speed.

Steve caught the Winter Soldier just before the ice block hit the ground.

***

“That has got to be the grossest use of a severed hand I’ve ever even heard of,” Clint said.

They’d made that mistake before, taking the ring off the finger of a Mandarin contender. So this wasn’t the best idea they’d ever had, but it was the only one. They took the severed hand, injected it with some of Tony’s nanobot suit controllers and Tony was pretending it was just a… very fleshy version of the gauntlet in order to manipulate the Zero ring in order to thaw out the Winter Soldier.

“Man,” Sam said, shoving at Clint’s shoulder, “here I was sure you had at least a half-dozen uses for a severed hand.”

Clint licked his lips, looking faintly green around the gills. “I do. This. Still the grossest.”

“Shut up,” Tony snapped. “And back off, One Direction, you are all too up in my space here.”

The problem was, he didn’t have any sort of telepathic connection to the ring itself. From what Tony understood, the very act of putting the ring on did a download of the instruction manual for the wielder.

Natasha was practicing her best interrogation techniques on the Once and Future Jack Frost, but the kid was still so fucking traumatized about losing the hand (and the fact that Tony had used the unibeam to sear the wound shut so that he wouldn’t die!) that he was barely coherent. Tony was about ready to start wiggling fingers randomly, just to see what happened, but that… could have unintended consequences, including sending them into another Ice Age, so Tony was trying, very hard, to keep hold of his patience. And hoped that his boyfriend didn’t fucking _melt_ before they could get him out of there.

“So help me,” Tony finally snapped, listening to the kid whimper and moan and complain, “if you don’t tell me how to fix this _right the fuck now_ , I will turn you upside down and feed you to the vacuum of space slowly where you can feel yourself die an inch at a time. We clear?”

Every single one of the Avengers turned to gape at him; they all knew Tony’s feelings about space, how he’d almost died alone, out there. The panic attacks, the sense of dread.

“I’d um… do what he says,” Steve said. “Because none of us are going to stop him.”

The boy, eyes eating up his face, made a simple gesture with his other hand, like catching a ball and twisting his wrist. Friday zoomed in, recorded it, replayed it.

“Do it again,” Tony said. He and Friday analyzed it. The motion was identical. “You got it Fri? Help me out here, babygirl.”

“You got it, boss,” the AI chirped.

_Please work, please work, please work._

Friday grabbed hold of Tony’s nanobots; she’d done it a few times when he was out of commission; the control was part of the Avalon protocols, which Tony had never bothered to explain to the team. He grimaced. At least Bucky couldn’t see what he was doing, because Bucky always noticed stupid shit like that, and Tony really wanted to put that reckoning off as long as possible.

His brain twitched as Friday ran the protocols up though his fingers, into his brain, and out through the nanobots.

The severed hand twisted, caught, manipulated the Zero ring’s energy.

Bucky fell to his knees, gasping, soaking wet and shivering.

“Oh god,” Bucky said. He couldn’t seem to move, hands planted on the cold rock floor, staring at the puddles of water than formed under him. “Oh, god. What… what year is it?”

Tony handed off the hand to Natasha, who cringed away, but took it, holding it out and away from her by one finger. “Oh, baby, Bucky, hey, hey, hey,” Tony said, the suit peeling back as fast as he could get Friday to shed it. “It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s only been a few hours, honey.” Freezing water soaked up into his flight suit as he slid to the ground, pulling Bucky into his arms.

“Oh, god,” Bucky said, again. He was so cold, his skin was like ice, his muscles moving slow and uncertain. Tony rubbed at his skin, trying frantically to warm him. “Tony, I… oh, god.”

“It’s all right, honey,” Tony said. Bruce was there, suddenly, shirtless and holding one of his multiple blankets that they stored on the Quinjet. “Thank you.”

“Give me a hand, here,” Clint said to Natasha, holding out a sample bin. “Let’s get our would-be Mandarin off to a nice toasty prison cell. This whole severed hand thing, that might be the way to go. This ring hasn’t vanished yet.”

“Man, I heard of eight heads in a duffle bag, but 10 hands in a ring box just seems a bit much,” Sam complained.

“Come on, honey, can you get -- Steve, help me out here,” Tony said. Between Steve carrying most of Bucky’s weight and Tony providing emotional support and warmth, they got the Winter Soldier back on the Quinjet.

Bucky was shivering, clinging to Tony with both hands. “Thought… didn’t know. Time passes different, when you’re frozen,” he said. Tony shuddered. “Your brain don’t slow down none, an’ there’s nothing to tell time with, no heartbeat, no breathin’, just time and time and more time. I… didn’t know if’d been an hour or another twenty years. If I’d lost you…”

“I’m right here,” Tony said, squeezing Bucky’s hand tighter. “I won’t leave you behind, I promise.”

Bucky tucked his face against Tony’s neck, still cold, still shivering, seeking Tony’s warmth and comfort. When Tony looked over Bucky’s shoulder, he saw Steve, solemn and stern. “Yeah, don’t you worry, pal,” Steve said, acknowledging Tony with a quick nod. “Tony won’t let you fall.”

“Don’t listen to this asshole,” Tony said as Bucky flinched. Steve was never going to forgive himself for the train. Tony rolled his eyes at Steve; Bucky was back with them, and it was time to let those things stay in the past where they belonged. “He’s the one that caught you, acting like Disney on Ice, I swear. I’ll have Friday play the logs when we get back. It was pretty amazing.”

“Wouldn’t have made it there without Tony’s help,” Steve said.

“It was a team effort,” Natasha said. She held a mug of cheap coffee between her hands. “Here, Yasha, have something warm to drink. It will help.”

Yeah, Tony thought, keeping one arm around Bucky’s shoulders while he cradled the cup, letting the heat soothe. “We make a great team. I mean, I _am_ the boss, but…” Tony kissed Bucky’s hair, letting the razzing of the team go over his head. It didn’t matter. What mattered was that he had Bucky in his arms and one of the Ten Rings on lockdown.

He was going to count it as a win.

 


End file.
